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“A Radiant and Productive Atmosphere”: Encounters of Wallace Stevens and Stanley Cavell

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2012

ÁINE KELLY
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Abstract

Writing on such diverse works as Shakespeare's King Lear, Wallace Stevens's “Sunday Morning” and Vincente Minnelli's The Bandwagon, Stanley Cavell is a philosopher consistently moved to philosophize in the realm of the aesthetic. Cavell invokes Stevens, particularly, at moments of his oeuvre both casual and constructive. In a commemorative address of the “Pontigny-en-Amérique” encounters at Mount Holyoke College in 2006, Cavell takes Stevens as his direct subject. During the original Pontigny colloquia, held during the wartime summers of 1942–44, some of the leading European figures in the arts and sciences (among them Hannah Arendt and Claude Lévi-Strauss) gathered at Mount Holyoke with their American peers (Stevens, John Peale Bishop and Marianne Moore) for conversations about the future of human civilization and the place of philosophy in a precarious world. Stevens suggested at the Pontigny meeting that the philosopher, compared unfavourably to the poet, “fails to discover.” As it is precisely Cavell's acknowledgement of the accidental or the unexpected as displaced from philosophy that draws him to the writings of Stevens, the Mount Holyoke encounters promise an illuminating dialogue between the two. The affinity between such central champions of the poetic dimension of American philosophy is sometimes obvious, more times in question.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , August 2012 , pp. 681 - 694
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), 678; hereafter CPP.

2 This article acknowledges the work of Paul Jenner, Loughborough University (specifically his unpublished doctoral thesis, submitted to the University of Nottingham in 2002, “The Philosophy of Stanley Cavell: Its Context and Early Development”).

3 Rachel Malkin, “Touchstones of Intimacy: Aesthetic Community in Stanley Cavell and Wallace Stevens” (unpublished conference paper, Stanley Cavell and Literary Criticism, University of Edinburgh, 2008). Hereafter “Touchstones.” An extended and amended version of Malkin's essay is forthcoming in the Spring 2012 issue of the Wallace Stevens Journal.

4 Cavell, Stanley, Emerson's Transcendental Etudes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar, 215.

5 Stanley Cavell, “Reflections on Stevens at Mount Holyoke” in Christopher Benfey and Karen Remmler, eds., Artists, Intellectuals and World War II: The Pontigny Encounters at Mount Holyoke College, 1942–1944 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 61; hereafter Reflections.

6 Critchley, Simon, Very Little, Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London: Routledge, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 125, original emphasis.

7 Ibid., 121.

8 Cavell, Stanley, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)Google Scholar, 182.

9 Critchley's, Simon book Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (London: Routledge, 2005)Google Scholar is perhaps the most recent and influential attempt – in many senses comparable to Cavell's – to read Stevens philosophically. Critchley emphasizes the importance of poetic form to Stevens's philosophical project, arguing that Stevens' poetry “contains deep, consequent and instructive philosophical insight, and … that this insight is best expressed poetically” (4). Later, he notes, “As a philosopher, what it is about Stevens that interests me is the fact that he found a manner that is wholly poetic, of developing full thoughts: theses, hypotheses, conjectures, ruminations and aphorisms that one should call philosophical” (16).

10 Malkin.

11 See Brazeal, Geoffrey, “Wallace Stevens’ Philosophical Evasions,” The Wallace Stevens Journal, 31, 1 (2007), 27–42Google Scholar; Critchley, Things Merely Are; Bloom, Harold, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 1980)Google Scholar and Poirier, Richard, Poetry and Pragmatism (New York: Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

12 Eeckhout, Bart, Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

13 See, for example, Levin, Jonathan, The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Rae, Patricia, The Practical Muse: Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme, Pound, and Stevens (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; and most recently Richardson, Joan, A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 See Hines, Thomas J., The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens: Phenomenological Parallels with Husserl and Heidegger (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; and Imber, Jonathan, “A Vocation of Reason: Wallace Stevens and Edmund Husserl”, Human Studies, 9 (1986), 3–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 CPP, 901.

16 CPP, 910.

17 Jenkins, Lee, Wallace Stevens: Rage for Order (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2000)Google Scholar. See especially chapter 2, “Parts of a World.”

18 Riddel, Joseph, The Clairvoyant Eye: The Poetry and Poetics of Wallace Stevens (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965)Google Scholar, 67.

19 Reflections, 68.

20 Reflections, 70.

21 Cavell, Stanley, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976)Google Scholar, 213–37; hereafter MWM.

22 Ibid.

23 MWM, p. xxii, original emphasis .

24 Reflections, 61–62.

25 Reflections, 72.

26 Reflections, 72.

27 Reflections, 72.

28 Reflections, 65.

29 Cavell, Stanley, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)Google Scholar, 12; hereafter IQO.

30 Cavell, Stanley, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991)Google Scholar, 10.

31 Gould, Timothy, Hearing Things: Voice and Method in the Writing of Stanley Cavell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 36–37Google Scholar.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

34 CPP, 856.

35 Ibid.

36 Cavell, Stanley, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

37 Rhu, Lawrence F., Stanley Cavell's American Dream: Shakespeare, Philosophy and Hollywood Movies (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 CPP, 451–2.

39 Hollander, John, “Stanley Cavell and The Claim of Reason”, Critical Inquiry, 6 (Summer 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 582.

40 Reflections, 70.

41 Ibid., 69.

42 Ibid., 76.

43 Ibid., 61.

44 Ibid., 65.

45 Ibid., 65.

46 Ibid., 78.

47 CPP, 864.

48 “Touchstones.”

49 CPP, 865.

50 Ibid., 639.

51 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 125.

52 CPP, 852.

53 IQO, 34.

54 CPP, 670.

55 Eeckhout, Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing, 39–40.